"This was not ballet," says Lynn Garafola, a professor of dance at Barnard College and author of a history called Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. "It was a style of expressive performance that was extremely violent, and that seemed to depart completely from conventional ballet vocabulary.

It included a lot of stamping. It included jumps. It didn't aspire to be ethereal — in other words, to look like jumps that could hang in the air. ... They seemed to go up simply to crash down into the earth. And then there were parts where they were simply trembling, when their hands were in fists, doing something that seemed, for all the world, to be primitive."